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Denis Gifford (26 December 1927 β 18 May 2000)Holland, Steve, Obituaries: Denis Gifford, The Guardian, 26 May 2000. was a British writer, broadcaster, journalist, comic artist and historian of film, comics, television and radio. In his lengthy career, he wrote and drew for ; wrote more than fifty books on the creators, performers, characters and history of popular media; devised, compiled and contributed to popular programmes for radio and television; and directed several short films. Gifford was also a major comics collector, owning what was perhaps the largest collection of British comics in the world.
Gifford's work in the history of film and comics, particularly in Britain, provided an account of the work in those media of previously unattempted scope, discovering countless lost films and titles and identifying numerous uncredited creators. He was particularly interested in the early stages in film and comics history, for which records were scarce and unreliable, and his own vast collection was an invaluable source. Gifford produced detailed filmographies of every traceable fiction, non-fiction and animated film ever released in the UK, and of early animated films in the US.
He compiled the first comics catalogue attempting to list every comic ever published in the UK, as well as the first price guide for British comics. His research into the early development of comics and cinema laid the groundwork for their academic study, and his reference works remain key texts in the fields.
Gifford was also a cartoonist and comic artist who worked for numerous titles, mostly for British comics in the 1940s, 50s and 60s. Although these were largely humour strips, he worked in a range of genres including superhero, Western fiction, science fiction and Adventure novel.
Gifford attended the South London private school Dulwich College (1939β44), and while a pupil there was an avid comic collector and cartoonist. He produced a comic, The Junior, using heated gelatine and hectograph ink, which he sold for 1d around the school, but had published comics art by the time he was 14 (1942).
Gifford became friends with Bob Monkhouse, a Dulwich schoolmate, fellow schoolboy cartoonist and later TV comedian and presenter, who studied in the year below and also had cartoons published while at the school. Gifford and Monkhouse collaborated on comics writing and drawing, a partnership that was to continue for many years in various forms, including as radio scriptwriters. The two toured together as a comedy act in the south east of England in the late 1940s with Ernie Lower's West Bees Concert Party, giving charity performances with Monkhouse as the 'straight man'. Gifford continued drawing during National Service in the Royal Air Force (1946-8), in which he served in the clerical position of 'AC1 Clerk/Pay Accounts', and went on to draw the Telestrip cartoon for the London Evening News.
After his National Service, Gifford drew the Telestrip cartoon for the London Evening News, continuing in Rex magazine (1971β72), and on bubblegum and cigarette sweet packets. Other newspaper strips were produced by Gifford for Empire State News and Sunday Dispatch.
Gifford's early work was with D.C. Thomson and the majority of his work was for humour strips, but he went on to cover various genres and styles, including adventure, detective, science fiction, Western and superheroes.
Gifford was most productive as a comics artist in the 1940s, 50s and 60s. By the early 1970s Gifford's writing career, mainly on the subjects of comics and film history, began to take over from his work as a cartoonist in his own right.
In the period Gifford drew for them, D.C. Thomson and most British comic publishers had a strict policy that artists could not sign their work but exceptionally, he was allowed to clearly sign his art.
Only Streamline Comics #1 had story and art by Gifford, although he contributed the one-page humour strip Inky the Imp of the Inkpot and the adventure strip Search for the Secret City in #4.
Mr Muscle should not be confused with the later DC character Mister Muscle of Hero Hotline, created by Bob Rozakis, or the Charlton Comics character Mr. Muscles, created by Jerry Siegel. Tiger-Man should not be confused with Tiger Man, the Street & Smith Golden Age hero, Tigerman, the Fiction House Golden Age hero, Tigerman or Trojak the Tiger-Man, the Marvel/Timely Golden Age heroes, or Tiger-Man, the Atlas/Seaboard character.
Gifford provided art for movie adaptation strip Roy Rogers in Western comic The Sheriff Comics (no date, 1950s), signing himself 'Gus Denis Gifford' and offering a drawing style in "his likenesses could approach very close to the American ones produced by Harry Parks", consistent with Gifford's busy, comical style in other genres.
Gifford drew the cover for Classics Illustrated #146 (British series), Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1962), a more comedic and cartoon-like rendering than was conventional for the title's covers, which tended to be classically heroic and often painted.
Gifford went on to produce several strips for the highly popular humour comic Knockout, including Our Ernie (1950), Stoneage Kit the Ancient Brit and his own creation, the gags and puzzles strip Steadfact McStaunch. He later revived Steadfast McStaunch for a run in IPC's new title Whizzer and Chips (1969), which itself merged with Knockout in 1973.
When Anglo took on US reprint series Annie Oakley, Gifford was one of the staff of British and Spanish artists used to create new strips (1957β58). Gifford went on to provide Western strips for Anglo Features title Gunhawks Western (1960β61) and humour strip Our Lad for Anglo's Captain Miracle (1961) contributed several humour strips for Anglo's anthology of Silver Age DC reprints, Super DC (1969β70), as well as reprints of his humour strip The Friendly Soul from Marvelman in Superman Bumper Book (1970) and Super DC Bumper Book #1 (1971). Later in the 1960s, Gifford also produced the one-off News of the Universe Television Service and regular humour strips Dan Dan the TV Man and the collection of one or two-panel gags, Jester Moment for TV Tornado (1967β68) where Mick Anglo was editor.
Gifford compiled a comprehensive reference work of British-made films, , listing every traceable film made in the UK, including short films generally omitted by film catalogues, with detailed entries including running time, certificate, reissue date, distributor, production company, producer, director, main cast, genre and plot summary. It was a labour of many years, as Gifford tracked down retired industry professionals and researched back issues of trade publications, fanzines and directories. The Catalogue's third (1994) edition revised all entries and was published in two volumes, The Fiction Film, 1895β1994 and The Non-Fiction Film, 1888β1994. It became a seminal work for British film historians, acclaimed by The British Film Institute (BFI)'s curator of Moving Image in a Sight & Sound magazine shortlist of the best ever film books: "The nearest we have to a British national filmography was created not by any institute or university but by one man." Gifford's popular work A Pictorial History of Horror also made the shortlist.
All editions of the Catalogue omitted animated films, but Gifford's British Animated Films, 1895β1985: A Filmography provided a similarly completist approach. Over 1200 films were detailed, attempting to include every British animated film of the period with a cinema release, whether full-length feature, short, public information film or advertisement. Gifford also provides an historical overview, giving particular attention to the pre-World War II era. As he was to attempt with the history of comics, Gifford sought to correct inaccuracies in cinema history that gave undue credit to the US industry, citing Dudley Buxton "who in first animated the sinking of the Lusitania in all its terrifying drama, three years before Winsor McCay tackled the same subject in the United States. Yet according to film history, McCay's version was the world's first dramatic cartoon film!"
Gifford's writing also included biographies of cinematic figures, including Boris Karloff: The Man, The Monster, The Movies and The Movie Makers: Charlie Chaplin, with his meticulous research and detailed knowledge well suited to the form.
Gifford was a judge at the Sitges 1977 International Festival of Fantasy and Horror.
The BFI holds an extensive archive of interviews recorded by Gifford of various figures in the film, television and comics industries. The Denis Gifford Collection is held as part of the BFI National Library. The BFI ran a Denis Gifford Tribute Evening at the National Film Theatre in January 2001 to mark his work on film history.
Horror held a special fascination for Gifford: he was an active figure in horror fandom of the 1950s, 60s and 70s, including the Gothique Film Society, and in the 1970s he had regular columns in Dez Skinn's House of Hammer magazine, first a serialised Golden History of Horror and later History of Hammer. However, Gifford had been deeply critical of Hammer Studios, especially the productions of its later years, preferring the more understated examples of early British and Hollywood horror. He found Hammer's relatively explicit use of blood-letting and sexuality to be cynically exploitative, noting in his 1973 A Pictorial History of Horror that "The new age of horror was geared to a new taste. Where the old films had quickly cut away from the sight of blood, Hammer cut in for a closeup." A Pictorial History of Horror was an influential work for a generation of film and horror enthusiasts, described in The Paris Review by author and journalist Dave Tompkins as "the most important book of my childhood".
Gifford was a lifelong fan of Laurel and Hardy, and founded 'Film Funsters', the first British branch of the Laurel & Hardy Appreciation Society, as well as writing several articles on the duo. He was also a keen Sherlock Holmes enthusiast, and was a member of the Sherlock Holmes Society, writing various reviews and articles on films featuring the detective.
Gifford wrote numerous articles on film and popular entertainment, both professionally and for fanzines.
While at Pathe, Gifford married Angela Kalagias, a fellow PathΓ© employee. The couple, who later divorced, had one daughter, Pandora Jane, born in 1965.
Gifford scripted the Space Race spoof Carry on Spaceman in 1962, but although scheduled, the film was not shot.
Comics scholarship, still relatively undeveloped in comparison to other media, was almost non-existent in 1971, when Gifford published his first book on comics history, Discovering Comics. At that time, no comprehensive archive of British comics existed, no fully researched cataloguing had been attempted, the mass pulping of comics in Britain in the 1940s meant that many issues and even titles were lost without effective records, no university courses were dedicated to the study of the medium, and serious research and debate had not taken place into the origin and development of the comic as a form. Gifford was determined that the comic should gain a credibility in mainstream culture and academia which it already possessed in continental Europe, and to a lesser extent the US: "Curiously, only Great Britain, where the comic paper was born, takes its comics for what they superficially seem β ephemera to be discarded as soon as read."Gifford, Denis, Discovering Comics, 1971, Introduction: The Editor's Chat. Although enthusiastic about comics of every era, Gifford had a particular passion for vintage comics, "earlier in the medium's evolution, when it was a chaos of one-offs, irregular schedules, and a comic historian's nightmare of inept publishers operating from the back rooms of run-down bookshops on a shoe string budget."
Gifford located the origin of the modern graphic narrative in the late nineteenth century, tracing development through various stages that included Judy - The London Serio-Comic Journal (1 May 1867) featuring Ally Sloper, the first recurring character in a text and picture serial. He observed in Victorian Comics that Sloper "was the first to appear in comic book format ... a paperback reprint collection ... the first to have his own comic paper ... and was the longest lived character in comic history." He suggested a key contender as the first comic as being the paper Funny Folks (12 December 1874), which had an unprecedented half-picture, half-text per page layout. Sloper's debut was certainly a series of panels, but it lacks "interdependence as a sequential narrative strategy" with images each relaying a single joke without forming a narrative with other panels, and it lacked some key features of the form, such as the speech bubble, while it had accompanying text for each image. Debate continues, but Gifford's research and conclusions into the origins of comics as a medium have gained considerable academic acceptance.
At a summit on comics history convened by the 1989 Lucca Comics Festival in Italy, Gifford was invited to be one of the eleven 'international specialists' to sign a declaration that The Yellow Kid was the first comic character having been first published in 1895. Gifford signed, but pointedly did so in the name of Ally Sloper, first published in 1867.
After media outrage at the 1976 Look Out for Lefty strip about football hooliganism in the IPC comic Action, Gifford controversially drew parallels with the Fredric Wertham of the US comics industry in the 1950s, remarking that "Perhaps its time we had another outcry against products like Action. Action is a new kind of comic geared to the lowest form of behaviour in children. Just as pornography caters for a mass market for adults, stuff like this provides violence for a mass market of children. As far as the people who produce Action are concerned, the children are simply a market and moral considerations do not apply." Despite 2000 AD (#1 published in 1977) producing iconic characters and innovative and critically acclaimed storyelling and art, Gifford had similar reservations about its violent content: "Whether children would actually enjoy living in the ... is another matter, for as depicted ... the future is a world of unrelieved violence." Gifford was clear that his preferences in comics writing and art were informed by his nostalgia for UK comics of the 1930s, reflecting that "I look back to the days of my youth ... when comics were things of joy and pleasure, rather than blood and guts."
However, Gifford's concerns were limited to comics intended for children and adolescents, and he was well aware of a development of the medium for an adult audience. He collected and was able to appreciate the content of underground and Modern Age comics, offering sophisticated and sometimes sympathetic analysis. Gifford's own Ally Sloper comic (1976) offered a combination of vintage and alternative strips for an adult audience, although the nostalgic strips were his primary interest.
Gifford was working on a filmography and history of 1930s British television, but died before its completion.
The scriptwriting partnership with Hawes began in radio, for weekly BBC concert party The Light Optimists (1953) and continued with stunt devising for the US-bought game show People Are Funny for Radio Luxembourg.
Gifford and Monkhouse reprised their partnership with BBC radio programmes on the history of the comics, Sixpence for a Superman (1999) on British comics and the two-part A Hundred Laughs for a Ha'penny (1999), a history of comic papers.
It was an obsession which dominated both his life and his South London home, once described in a colour supplement interview as the den of "a boy who had run away from home" and never returned. A reliable figure was never established for the size of his collection, but its scale constrained movement throughout the house and extended into every room, even the kitchen: "There are comics on the stove, on the fridge, on the floor. Denis Gifford can still use his grill, but roasts are a memory for he can no longer open his oven. The fridge filled up years ago, for Denis is fascinated by the free gifts that come with some comics ... There are lollipops in the fridge now, and Desperate Dan nougat."
Unusually for a collector, Gifford's interests were defined by their eclecticism, including comics, radio recordings and film from throughout the world and spanning from the origins of the media up to new releases. His own 'biog' for a 1975 book calculates his collection "extends to some 20,000 issues" but is careful to limit the estimate to the particularly British form of 'comic papers' which excluded his vast collection of American comic books, and in any case accumulated many more in the next 25 years of his life. He had certain specific interests, notably British horror films of the 1930s to the 1960s, early cinema and radio, Laurel and Hardy movies and memorabilia, British comic papers of the late nineteenth century and British and US comics of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, especially those which featured personalities from contemporary radio. However, the parameters of his interests and collection broadened substantially throughout his life.
Gifford's collection had suffered an early setback, an anecdote related by Bob Monkhouse: "You cannot begin to imagine his grief when he completed his National Service to return home to find that his mother had thrown away his huge collection of Film Fun, The Joker, Merry and Bright and a dozen other titles ... Denis was to spend the rest of his life trying to replace those lost copies." Gifford's mother was later to express deep regret at their destruction.
Despite his hopes that his vast collection might form the basis of a national museum of comics, through an archive such as the Victoria and Albert Museum National Art Library Comics and Comic Art Collection, it was broken up and auctioned off after his death, "leaving 12 tons of paper at his home to be cleared and sorted." Monkhouse reflected in the foreword to auction catalogue of The Denis Gifford Collection on how one "whose researches were so meticulous have allowed this vast gathering of treasures to have swollen into such unruly and uncatalogued confusion". The sale was described in the auction pamphlet as "surely the largest private collection of annuals, books, cartoons, cinema history, comics, ephemera & original artwork ever to come on the market. The collection, housed in some 600 boxes and weighing ten tons, arrived on a groaning lorry and took five men nearly three hours to unload. We expect sales to run to some 4000 lots."
Gifford's collection was the product of his lifelong passion for comics and popular culture, and his highly prolific research work was an attempt to provide a comprehensive history of the ephemeral. Particularly in the early decades of his writing on the subject, pop culture drew little attention from academic research and Gifford was particularly passionate about the most obscure examples of vintage comics, film, television and radio, and determined that they should be recognised, chronicled and remembered before extant copies were lost.
In the 1970s he helped introduce comics conventions to the UK, events where creators and industry figures could meet and respond to comics fans. It was a significant progression of the already established comics marts where comics were simply sold, and in which Gifford was a key figure. He was the only comics industry guest at an early meeting of Britain's major comics convention, Comicon 74/Comic Mart Summer Special 1974, where he provided the introductory presentation.
Gifford organised Comics 101 in 1976, the first convention dedicated to British comic creators, with guests including celebrated figures in British comics including Frank Hampson, Leo Baxendale, Frank Bellamy and Ron Embleton, Marvelman creator Mick Anglo and Garth creator Steve Dowling, Gifford conducting an on-stage interview with Dowling. The name of the convention was a reference to the 101 years since the first issue of Funny Folks (1874) which Gifford regarded as the first comic.
In 1977 Gifford co-founded the Society of Strip Illustration, a network for all those involved in any stage of the creative process of comics production which later became the Comic Creators Guild. In 1978 he established the Association of Comics Enthusiasts, whose newsletter Comic Cuts ran for 14 years proper and, as a section of UK comics fanzine The Illustrated Comics Journal, until his death. Gifford also wrote extensively for comics magazines and fanzines, particularly Comic Cuts, and it was here that he wrote some of his most specialist work on comics history and criticism.
Prizegiving of the first Ally Sloper Awards for comic creators also took place at Comics 101, with Bob Monkhouse presenting.
Gifford continued to organise, guest and attend comics conventions throughout the 1970s, 80s and 90s in the UK, USA and throughout Europe, including regular guest appearances the Lucca International Comics Festival, was an official guest at the first UK Comic Art Convention (UKCAC) in 1985 and was a guest speaker at the 1st UK Paperback and Pulp Bookfair in 1991.
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